When I looked at my own Facebook Timeline, to my horror I saw Pinterest had followed people I didnt know and definitely did NOT follow AND it posted it to my Facebook Timeline. No wonder I keep getting notices of other people following me — people I don’t know or others whom I have not interacted with for years!.

The more I use Pinterest the more I HATE it. See my previous post about Pinterest auto-following 274 Facebook friends when I signed up, without first checking with me.

Hey Carriers. We need to talk. You know how you said you were going to start throttling high data usage users in hopes to preserve bandwidth? That’s bullshit, apparently. It’s only because you want to get us onto tiered data plans so you can charge us overages. With hate, everyone.

Seriously. Validas, an analytics firm, analyzed 50,000 cellphone bills from AT&T and Verizon to see if throttling was a necessary evil to conserve bandwidth. However, the numbers point to no. Instead, Validas guesstimates that it’s because carriers would rather have us on tiered data plans for the overage fees. According to Validas:

“When we look at the top 5% of data users, there is virtually no difference in data consumption between those on unlimited and those on tiered plans — and yet the unlimited consumers are the ones at risk of getting their service turned off. So it’s curious that anyone would think the throttling here represents a serious effort at alleviating network bandwidth issues. After all, Sprint does seemingly fine maintaining non-throttled unlimited data for its customers.”

The point being, throttling the Top 5% of unlimited data users seems to be unnecessary because the Top 5% are using the same amount of data on their tiered plans anyway. Go figure, carriers trying to squeeze a dime out of a nickel. [BGR]

Frequenters of India’s online Microsoft Store were briefly greeted with the suspicious visage of a Guy Fawkes mask this morning, following a hack that compromised the site’s user database. According to WPSauce, Microsoft Store India’s landing page was briefly taken over by a hacker group called Evil Shadow Team, who, in addition to putting a new face on Windows products, revealed that user passwords were saved in plain text. The group’s motivations are unknown, though the hacked page warned that an “unsafe system will be baptized.” The store is now offline, suggesting that Microsoft may have regained control. Read on for a look at the compromised password database.

Google can now look at what you’ve been doing on YouTube, Gmail, and Google+ to suggest search results and “more relevant ads.”

Google can take information you provide on your Google Profile, including your name and photo, and use it on all your other Google products like Gmail — and can replace past names you used, so you’re the same on all sites.

Google will collect information from your mobile device, including your phone number, and associate it with your Google Account.

We use the information we collect from all of our services to provide, maintain, protect and improve them, to develop new ones, and to protect Google and our users. We also use this information to offer you tailored content – like giving you more relevant search results and ads.

We may use the name you provide for your Google Profile across all of the services we offer that require a Google Account. In addition, we may replace past names associated with your Google Account so that you are represented consistently across all our services. If other users already have your email, or other information that identifies you, we may show them your publicly visible Google Profile information, such as your name and photo.

The first rule of not being evil is: don’t do things you think are evil. So it’s a shame that Google has violated its own policy by giving bloggers cash in exchanges for writing about its browser, Chrome.

Google, or perhaps more likely its advertising firm Unruly, has managed to sponsor bloggers to chew the fat over Chrome, reports SEO Book. Some of them talk about how great Chrome is for small businesses, and most contain a Google promo video.

Meh, that’s kind of fine, right? Mmm, the thing is, paid-for links to the Chrome download page would be just fine according to Google’s rules — as long as they were tagged up as “nofollow” links. That’s supposed to let PageRank know that a link was paid for so as to exclude it from search rankings.

But, uh, some of the links didn’t follow that guideline.

OK, so this isn’t too bad: it isn’t like Google is culling small kittens, granted. And it could in fact be an innocent mistake on the part of the bloggers. But what it more likely indicates is that Google is getting so large that it can’t help but trip over its own policies. And at that point, it becomes difficult to hold an entire organisation up to its existing ethical codes.

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.